An insurer may provide payments when claims are made in connection with a disability insurance policy. For example, an employee who becomes too ill to work might receive payments associated with a long term disability insurance policy purchased by his or her employer. Note that payments might continue until the employee is able to return to work. The insurer may assign a claim handler to communicate with the employee, the employer, and/or medical service providers to facilitate the employee's return to the workplace. Moreover, different claim handlers may have different abilities and/or different workloads.
In one approach, newly received disability insurance claims might be assigned to claim handlers in a random or round robin manner. This, however, might lead to one claim handler having a significantly more complex workload as compared to another claim handler. To avoid such a result, particular types of disability insurance claims might be more effectively assigned to particular claim handlers. For example, a relatively complicated insurance claim might be more efficiently processed by a claim handler who handles a relatively small number of insurance claims and/or is especially skilled when it comes to handling these types of insurance claims.
Manually determining which claim handler should be assigned to each individual insurance claim, however, can be time consuming task, especially when there are a substantial number of claims to be analyzed. For example, an insurer might receive tens of thousands of new long term disability insurance claims each year (which might represent a billion dollars of potential liability). It would therefore be desirable to provide systems and methods to facilitate the assignment of disability insurance claims to claim handlers, in an automated, efficient, and accurate manner.